The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘His spirits are higher now,’ his collaborator Alberto Duman told me, ‘or is it the drugs that are fed to him?’

  A public ward at the Homerton was another kind of community altogether, less sheltered, more disparate in background and affiliation. Clients were united in pain, in the grudge of dormitory imprisonment and diminished motion. They drifted into reverie or chemically induced suspension of reality. ‘Hasidic Jews, mad old Cockneys,’ Will reported with relish. ‘A clinically obese man, a monstrous giant of flab, being spoonfed by his mother.’

  One by one, the other members of the collective straggled in, shaking wet coats, warming their hands around mugs of tea. Will, with his green beanie pulled right down, his hipster beard, explained that his partner Andrew was the official guardian of the building. Bock had lived here for a year and eight months. He was interested in photography and performance – and, in the wake of recent excavations, local history. The four-day removal of Hackney earth led the collective towards research into the place where, by some trick of fate, they found themselves.

  Alberto Duman, the most politically engaged, had the notion that if a significant ‘discovery’ was made during the dig – a Templar relic, a sword or grail cup – then the demolition process might be halted. He recollected prankster actions in territory beyond the former watercress beds now overlaid with a 24-hour Tesco Superstore.

  When council officials ushered representatives of the Manhattan Loft Corporation around the development site, just one day before a planning application for the conversion of Chatham Place went through, Alberto and a summoned flash mob began to sweep the area with brooms. They surrounded the old industrial warehouse, the monolith with a Burberry outlet on the ground floor. They climbed on lampposts, scrubbing and polishing with fanatical zeal. Security couldn’t arrest them for civic altruism. The corporate suits stood bemused, staring at their phones and tablets, wondering what dark stain had to be scoured away. What crimes were being erased to make way for the coming era of retail adventurism?

  Further research by Duman tracked Hackney Brook across Mare Street, where a railway bridge carrying London Overground to the malls of Stratford had replaced the footbridge seen in period engravings. And on, under Morning Lane, towards the River Lea. Alberto was amused to note that the constructors of the Holiday Inn, shoe-horned alongside Hackney Central (amid rumours of a bigger station for the coming Crossrail 2), had been less assiduous in their searches. The foundations of the new building, on the rainy night when we met for the first time, were a black lake. An unplanned basement swimming pool filled with sump oil.

  Exploiting the practical skills of Sophie Mason, a garden artist, and the person who recognised that they would need a bucket and rope to remove the soil, Duman and the other diggers laid out tables of archaeological finds: broken clay pipes, bits of bone, unidentified shards of pottery, junked forks and spoons. There was no requirement, as there had been with the pre-Olympic remediation of the Lower Lea Valley, to produce an exhibition of their spoils. The Hole dictated its own terms. Earth is not sieved. They penetrate a crust of grey conglomerate, older houses, older pubs and cinemas, shops reduced to crumbs that resist the pick. Working together provokes intimacy. The artists are excited by how they hear themselves telling each other stories; how they rhapsodise and forge a fellowship of resistance. This, I remember, is a commonplace of any labouring job for wages. It is the best of it. It is what we choose to carry away.

  William Bock made the Hole into a camera obscura with lid and lens. The collective painted the walls of the pit white with gesso and gum. Those who came down the ladder into the earth cell, after their eyes adjusted to the absence of light, found the experience captivating. The world above appeared in phantom form, inverted; a ribbon of articulate shadows, trees like underwater clouds, the ivy-covered rectory building, and people leaning in over the grave. A primitive projection of cave drawings spilling out from their heads. They were remembering as much as experiencing.

  By now, each member of the collective was reading from a different script. Will privileged the performance aspect, a provocation for rituals. And for the manufacture of images, including a carpet-sized print made on the floor of the pit, when the excavated space became a pinhole camera. Sophie Mason treated the garden as a world unto itself. Alberto Duman, with sceptical eye, and knowledge of événements in other cities, listened and plotted; he took the diary of the Hole as a future manifesto. Mark Morgan, an excavation theorist, biding his time at the edge of the gathering in the candlelit room, revealed that he had made a calculation. According to values per square metre of towers going up in Hackney, basements being hacked out, every pint of earth salvaged from the rectory lawn was worth £2.50.

  They climbed down the ladder, all the strands of local activism; poets, musicians, oral historians, solicitors who spent years battling over doomed music halls and Georgian terraces trashed in arson attacks. They read their texts with their voices barely reaching the surface. Performers twisted and turned, trying to find their special spot, before they dared to look up at the trees and the stars.

  Jess Chandler, publisher and curator, said that being in the Hole made her feel completely alone. She voiced poems by dead makers, spirits of place: Derek Jarman and Steve Moore. In this ‘grave-like setting,’ as she described it, Jess felt ‘as though the audience could choose to bury you at any moment.’ She wanted fire and honey to ooze from cracks in the earth, but the ground was arid and unforgiving.

  Chiara Ambrosio used her descent as an invitation to balance temporary inhumation with the silence of the soul. The sudden chill entering the bones was a defence against a manifest of what had been left behind on the surface. ‘As the pavements are lifted from the ground, I can see the soil beneath it glinting like moist flesh.’

  Bill Parry-Davies, taking time off from a court battle with Hackney Council over the treatment by the developers Murphy of the last rind of Dalston Lane, blew his saxophone from the pit in feisty lament. He had issued his jeremiad before this. ‘The conservation plan is to demolish them all. To create a tabula rasa. A year zero solution. After demolition the houses will be rebuilt, in heritage likeness, with machined bricks, with machined slates, with machined joinery, as Georgian replicas to create a Georgian theme park.’

  Bill’s words were swallowed, but the sounds he blew reverberated around the pit. He told me that he experienced his solo penetrating the earth and going out with the spoil and the worms. And it felt good. And it felt right.

  Another voluntary prisoner in the white-walled kiln ran into technical difficulties with her presentation. Karen Russo, a young Israeli artist, cultivated a fascination with William Lyttle, the so-called ‘Mole Man’ of Hackney. Lyttle, talked up by estate agents promoting the auction of the tragic shell of a property wedged like a ghost ship in the pack ice between Mortimer Road and Stamford Road, was puffed as ‘a civil engineer’. The engineering project that won him local notoriety involved a labyrinth of tunnels beneath a house from which all other occupants – family, lodgers – had been expelled. Rumour had the abandoned rooms filled with rubble, walls papered with yellowing newsprint. And catacombs, chewed out by the solitary digger, running into cellars, cutting through utility cables, and causing cracks in the road surface into which double-decker buses tipped.

  Mr Lyttle’s exploits inspired a cult. Young boys swapped Mole Man headlines from the Hackney Gazette. They pictured a chainsaw cannibal in moleskin hood netting lost children and populating the underworld, between buried rivers and coming Crossrail tunnels, with monsters, hybrid creatures, gypsum zombies. Russo heard the first furtive whispers of the Mole Man in 2006.

  I met her in one of the surviving but revamped pubs in Broadway Market, where she lived in a small flat. She would be leaving soon for Walthamstow, rent hikes made continued Hackney residence impossible. There was a young family to support. She went down into the Hole, so she told me, to give an ethnographic account, supported by photographs of her expeditions with Mr
Lyttle into what was left of the tunnels. The Mole Man had been removed by Hackney Council. They plugged his caves with fat concrete boles. The site was hidden behind a corrugated iron fence, but William said that he knew a way in.

  The performance in the Hole faltered. Russo’s laptop did not respond to premature burial. There were no images and her voice did not carry. She had to adapt, physically, to the absence of light. She was sustained by the singular illumination she found in darkness. She felt like an animal. Her eyes shone as she recalled the initiation of becoming an earth battery with no pictures to project on the walls of the excavated hide that was now her place.

  Plunged into an investigation of ‘the psychogeography of underground environments in London’, Russo determined, whatever the risks, to track down the elusive Mr Lyttle. And to forge a relationship. To make a film.

  Our table in the pub was soon spread with books, papers and the flickering laptop. The Mole Man presentation looked like an auction promo in which every pristine CGI interior has rotted into a crime scene photograph. Stone steps went nowhere. Porcelain basins for midgets, Morlocks with warped spines, were set a few inches from the floor. Sofas sagged under the weight of coupled bodies cast in mud. Tunnels were blocked with the Caesarian sections of cars and propped up with salvaged deep-freeze units. Where you might expect a devotional picture on the wall, Lyttle hung a keyboard or a three-bar electric fire.

  After the Mole Man vanished from the secure accommodation to which he’d been banished, and official channels claimed to have lost track of the unsanctioned excavator, Russo ran him to ground at Crisis Skylight Café in Commercial Street. William was taking acting classes. It was said that he had a part in a radio play, but nobody knew when, if ever, the broadcast went out. Despite being stitched up, so he claimed, by a television company doing a piece on property makeovers that went wrong, Mr Lyttle was happy to engage, in person, with Karen Russo. He agreed to make recordings and to be filmed on the platforms of Underground stations at Holborn and Aldwych.

  When the tapes eventually rolled, the Mole Man opened his throat and spewed out a venomous diatribe of inappropriate sexual dalliance with racist sidebars. Russo, who came to this confrontation by way of Novalis, Hoffman, Hoffmannsthal and German Romanticism, the folk tale of a young miner brought to the surface in a state of perfect preservation, seventy years after the accident that killed him, found her interactions with William Lyttle challenging.

  ‘How come you have a small nose? Jews don’t have blue eyes.’

  On and on he went, trying to probe her intimate preferences. Russo remembered legends of lovers who descended into the depths to reclaim partners enraptured by the goddess of death. Now she was involved with a dribbling Celtic Minotaur in gabardine whose wife had moved out, disappeared from the story, leaving him to his drills and shovels. Mr Lyttle posed in the rubble, silver hair combed back, in open-necked shirt and a trenchcoat that was literally that, veteran of the trenches.

  ‘Artists don’t need to take on a moral tone,’ Russo said. ‘I kind of like the idea of the artist as devil’s advocate.’

  Psychotic rants rolled and echoed through tunnels that ran in every direction from the basement of the Mortimer Road house. In the new Hackney, a property of this size, in this location, was worth well over a million pounds. The council were demanding hundreds of thousands from the expelled householder for the damage he had inflicted on his own underworld. Mr Lyttle dropped hints about a fortune buried in one of his caverns, biscuit tins with £50,000 bundled up in greasy rolls of banknotes. The bait kept the remediating crew interested.

  Then the crisis came. William Lyttle made a physical assault. He seized Russo’s tapes and kept them as bargaining chips. In her original thesis, Russo glossed the Mole Man’s rogue archaeology as an outsider version of orthodox art practice: a self-funded parody of the rhetoric of Anselm Kiefer’s labyrinth at La Ribaute, the compound near Barjac in Provence. Mortimer Road was La Ribaute without budget or status. Without the support of the art establishment. Or a visitation from John Berger. The psychosis of William Lyttle was naked behind its inadequate security fence. Naked and dancing in a stained republican trenchcoat. The fetid soliloquy accompanying the excavations was obscene. ‘Curiosity is my curse,’ the Mole Man said. ‘If I make a start, I must know where it ends.’

  Kiefer’s labyrinth was constructed by a crew of trained workmen: as a metaphor. In meticulously calibrated layers of darkness, solemn pilgrims would be reminded of the light. ‘Everything that happens in the tunnels is reflected above.’ Haphazard towers on a private estate, with entrances to the underworld, are designed to tumble. Their essence is their fallibility. Bulldozers cough and snarl. The artist finesses the alchemy of ruin: a spill of lead here, a scatter of ash there. Film crews arrive to pay their respects.

  The monumental German artist, supporting a nation’s guilt on his shoulders, boasted to documentary-maker Sophie Fiennes: ‘116 lorries have already left’. Kiefer oversaw the break up of his Barjac studios and the removal of artworks to hangars in Paris. The new accommodation was convenient. It was ‘out by the airport, beside the motorway to Germany’.

  William Lyttle’s effects, when he absconded from his council-sanctioned room, were seized. The tapes of the interview with Karen Russo were mislaid among books and shoes and shirts. He asked her to pretend to be his lawyer. The deception shouldn’t be a problem, he said, after all she was Jewish. If she agreed to fight his case with the officials, he might return the impounded material. But it all was too late. When Mr Lyttle presented himself at the housing offices, they told him that his belongings had been destroyed. He died soon afterwards.

  When the news broke, two years after the death of the Mole Man, that his house had been bought at auction by a couple of second generation YBA stars from Shoreditch, for north of a million pounds, the triangulation between land value, conceptual interventionism and psychopathic burrowing became critical. David Adjaye, the ubiquitous architect of the moment, was already onboard. Adjaye was responsible for the Idea Store, a glitzy toy box that replaced the old book-burdened Whitechapel Library. Set alongside Sainsbury’s car park, this colourful intruder looked like a Rubik’s cube made from acrylic perspex. The moving stairs didn’t move but there was a nice café with a view over the Jewish burial ground in Brady Street and the improved and extended Royal London Hospital.

  Alberto Duman, recalling his action with the broom outside the designer shopping hub in Chatham Place, told me that the Pringle sock shop on the corner, the one flagged up as you step from the Overground at Hackney Central, was soon to be replaced by a David Adjaye tower. The impetus that brought the media-friendly architect responsible for the International Finance Corporation headquarters in Dakar, Senegal, and the modifier of the presidential palace in Libreville, Gabon, to a trashed shell in Hackney, was friendship. He had fond memories of an earlier collaboration with the artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster. That gig featured a conversion that was also a signature work in which the raven-haired couple could hang out and manufacture their branded products: the Dirty House in Shoreditch.

  Redchurch Street, a borderline between the selfie-spattered, tourist-cruised, retro reservation of Brick Lane and the islands of public housing, the small furniture and shoemaking operations of Bethnal Green, was about to detonate. To implode with cool. The area had been cooking quietly for years. Coming artists, taking advantage of opportunities offered by decamped industries, found the space they needed for contemplation and family life. It was a period of inward migration. In harsher times, established and successful immigrants escaped the ghetto by moving to Stoke Newington and the leafier purlieus of Victoria Park. Now, being taken up by Charles Saatchi, White Cube or Nicholas Serota meant a shift in the opposite direction.

  ‘There’s real estate and unreal estate,’ Don DeLillo said. And the Mole Man’s tunnels were as about as unreal as London can manage without actually turning inside out. Sewage trench to trophy installation in one jump.


  Tim Noble and Sue Webster mastered the rubbish racket in a more calculated and rewarding fashion. They scavenged, swept up: transforming, by smart curation, the least required into top-ticket essential. They were addicts of entropy. They remodelled junk heaps and projected silhouettes on gallery walls. And these shadows, by some mysterious trick, evolved into self-portraits. It felt as if all the grunge traces of the embattled city were auditioning to become avatars of the twinned artists.

  The Dirty House, a former timber factory, was recast by Noble and Webster, with some professional help from Adjaye, as a light-devouring black monolith; a stockade that had been there all along, waiting for its moment. Trading in novelty, the Shoreditch artificers, under the insidious influence of place, engaged with whispers from the past. They liked the idea that their designer bunker had once been a pub called the Blue Anchor.

  But then the landscape changed, changed utterly. It was no longer so pleasurable to gaze south from a high window. The Bishopsgate Goods Yard development went ahead. Pop-up shops were stacked like brazen Tilbury containers on a lurid carpet of artificial grass. It was party time for cross-town transients, intersex retail vamps delivered by the Ginger Line. Customised stuff was being sucked up with malarial relish. The twittering of cell phones replaced the dawn chorus of sparrows in the London plane trees around Arnold Circus. Artists with property portfolios feared for the exclusivity of their patch.